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An anonymous reader writes "'The blind will see again,' could be the motto of the Artificial Retina Project, which is getting ready to implant a 60-pixel artificial retina chip into 10 blind patients later this year. 60-pixels doesn't sound like much, but the 1st gen artificial retina brought tears to the eyes of its six recipients, who claim they can now count large objects with just 16-pixels. If all goes well, a 200-pixel retina will be ready in three years; the chip used is of a 1.2-micron CMOS process, with both power and video supplied wirelessly." (And this is sponsored by the Department of Energy for what reason?)

I wish this had been developed in time for Dan Alderson [wikipedia.org] to have gotten one. The last two years he was at JPL, I was his "seeing eye person" because diabetic retinopathy had ruined his vision. Jerry Pournelle [jerrypournelle.com] once dedicated a book to him, calling him "the sane genius." Among other things, Dan wrote the navigation software that was used by Project Voyager, and he was still doing things that most programmers would have sworn were impossible when his health failed completely and he was forced to retire.

I may have inherited a form of Retinitis Pigmentosa. I am color blind to certain shades of red & green (they look brown or orange or multiple shades of red/green/brown), which can be an indicator of inheritance of the retinal degenerative disorder. I may need bionic eyes (with eye beams, hopefully) when I'm 40 to 60 years old.

because of the difficulty in connecting 300,000+ (how exactly is color encoded for the brain?) wires/electrodes to the optical nerve

That is precisely the reason, but I wonder why they don't mix in some stem cell research with their bio-informatics to essentially grow the connections in place. We can grow flesh, so it might be possible to manipulate it to bond with the electrodes. Perhaps the electrodes are just too big to fit a small fortune in the eye.

Honestly, depending on the tech available at the time, I would be glad to donate one of my good eyes to someone wealthier than I in exchange for enough cash to purchase an eye that could see at multiple wavelengths. Bonus points if I can wirelessly transmit the output from the eye to hardware and it can run off the glucose in my body.